Scratch that. Some know about Mississippi, the Mississippi you sang about in 1964, but they pretend otherwise. Take Haley Barbour. In an interview pusblished in the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard last month, the governor of my home state said that, as he recalls it, the 1960s in Yazoo City, Miss., were not as horrible as history buffs might assume. "I just don't remember it being that bad," he told the magazine. Why? Because his town's Citizens' Council made sure to turn the Ku Klux Klan away.

If one group of segregationists tells a more violent group of segregationists to scram, it should be clear that evil remains prevalent. After outrage over his apparent praise of his hometown's Citizens Council, Barbour released a statement: ''My point was my town rejected the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody should construe that to mean I think the town leadership were saints, either. Their vehicle, called the Citizens Council, is totally indefensible, as is segregation."

Lying about American history and scrubbing segregation of its toxicity are also indefensible, but earlier last year, the 63-year-old Barbour told the conservative magazine Human Events that his "generation went to integrated schools. I went to integrated college. Never thought twice about it." Integrating Ole Miss, Barbour remembers, was a "very pleasant experience."

Roy DeBerry, my uncle, was born the same year as Barbour. He was forced to attend all-black schools because segregation was Mississippi law. He stood watching as the National Guard rode through Holly Springs in 1962 on their way to Oxford. Sent by President John F. Kennedy, those troops were being deployed to the University of Mississippi on behalf of James Meredith, a black man who was trying to enroll against the wishes of Gov. Ross Barnett.

Barbour said the first black woman to enroll at Ole Miss, Verna Bailey, was one of his good friends. He wasn't the most disciplined student, he said, and she was kind enough to let him copy her notes. "I still love her," he told Human Events.

Verna Bailey says, Who?

"I don't remember him at all, no, because during that time that certainly wasn't a pleasant experience for me," she told McClatchy Newspapers in September. "My interactions with white people were very, very limited. Very, very few reached out at all." When she and another student were pelted with coins and beer at the square in Oxford, she said, "I thought my life was going to end." She remembers a white minister leading her to safety. She remembers him being one of the very few white people who treated her kindly. She remembers him catching hell for that.

The member of an oppressed group is likely to have a different view of things than the member of the group enforcing the oppression. Humiliations, insult and stinging blows are bound to look less severe going out than coming in. This is a point that Martin Luther King Jr. makes in 1963's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." He addressed his letter not to the Klan or anybody else who was giving people reason to call Birmingham "Bombingham." He addressed his letter to the clergy, upstanding people, men of good repute, those who no doubt were sickened by the savagery of the Klan but not convinced that integration was an urgent concern.

"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice."

Barbour made a distinction between the Klan and the Citizens Council. King equates the two as being equally hostile to black people's push for freedom. Unlike the folks King criticized, Barbour doesn't confuse the absence of tension with the presence of justice. Instead, he pretends that the tension -- riots at Ole Miss, Molotov cocktails hurled at the National Guard, two people killed -- was never there.

But as Nina Simone sang so defiantly, "Everybody knows about Mississippi." A damn shame that the governor there is talking to us like we don't.

Jarvis DeBerry can be reached at jdeberry@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3355. Follow him at http://connect.nola.com.user/user/jdeberry/indext.html and at twitter.com/jarvisdeberrytp.